Interventional medicine is the collection of medical procedures in which access to the site of treatment is made by navigation through one of the subject's blood vessels, body cavities or lumens. Interventional medicine technologies have been applied to manipulation of medical instruments such as guide wires and catheters which contact tissues during surgical navigation procedures, making these procedures more precise, repeatable and less dependent on the device manipulation skills of the physician. Some presently available interventional medical systems for directing the distal tip of a medical device from the device proximal end use computer-assisted navigation and a display means for providing an image of the medical device within the anatomy, along with anatomical images obtained previously from a separate imaging apparatus. Such systems can display a projection of the medical device being navigated to a target destination obtained from a projection imaging system such as a Fluoroscopy (X-ray) imaging system, and can also provide a three-dimensional rendition of blood vessels and tissues obtained for example from a prior volumetric imaging examination such as a Computed Tomography (CT) examination; the surgical navigation being effected through means such as remote control of the orientation of the distal tip and proximal advance of the medical device.
In some cases, it may be difficult for a physician to become or remain oriented in a three dimensional setting using a display of a single-plane image projection. Enhancement or augmentation of the single-plane projection image may be required to aid the physician in visualizing the relative position and orientation of the medical device with respect to three-dimensional (3D) tissue surfaces and organs in the body. A method is therefore desired for enhancing a display image of the medical device and anatomical surfaces to include three-dimensional images of surfaces and organs in the body.